Wednesday, March 24, 2010

I wanted to bring a lemon cake to my friend’s house the other day. You know, one of those really yummy moist ones. And while the internet and I have always gotten on like bread and cheese and I’ve been able to find recipes for anything from Ethiopian stews to stain removals in carpets, I have to say that the lemon broke the internet. I trawled through pages and pages of recipes only to find that no one seems to bake a bloody lemon cake from scratch anymore. Ingredients were limited to lemon cake mix and lemon jello mix. And then I also found one that had no lemon at all in the lemon cake. It was an ugly thing. Even my cooking books didn’t provide any help. Eventually I made up my own mix and as we sat there coming up with puns like the internet can be a bit ‘unrind’ or ‘citrus shits us’, we wondered why you can buy everything pre-made but no one will sell you preserved lemons for your tajine. The tradition of keeping recipe books through generations, with domestic goddesses that recorded the beautiful successes that a bay leaf could bring the irish stew, is in our minds such a beautiful one. So rather than chewing through the new age, we’d like to fill our bellies with history and Mum’s quiches.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hey Darling,

Stacy recently cooked a lemon cake and the recipe she found online had 7 eggs in it, it ended up tasting like a lemon omelette. I used to make a lemon cake but it truth it was simply a plain cake mix with fresh lemon juice and grated zest, the real lemon smack came from the lemon icing. The poor lemon cake has gone by the wayside, you have to bring it back.

in a separate bowl whisk egg whites until shiny peaks form. stir one large scoop into the cake mixture and combine thoroughly. then add the rest of the whites and just fold through.

cook at 180' for ~40mins, (150' for gluten free), until golden on top and it should still feel slightly undercooked when pressed, it will dry out over about 1/2 hr when taken out so that it is just the right amount moist.